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About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

The symphonies of "communist" German composer Hans Werner Henze; his controversial "The Raft of the Medusa"

Back in my college days of the 1960s, I did take an interest
in other modern composers who might somehow follow on to post-romantic
traditions.

Sometime, after starting working, I bought the DG set of the
six symphonies by Hans Werner Henze, and eventually “replaced” them with the CD
set.

I played symphonies 1, 5 and 6 today (dated 1947, 1962 and
1969) today, and I have to wonder what I was thinking. The Berlin Philharmonic (#1 and 5) and London
Symphony (#6) are conducted by the composer.

Symphony #1 is rather accessible, and reminds me of
Hindemith. There is a measure of real
lyricism in the second movement, a Nocturne.

Symphony #5 offers a theme (as a second subject in the first
movement) from Henze’s opera “Elegy for Young Lovers”. There is some controversy as to what city
stimulated Henze’s creativity here: New
York, or Rome?

But the most unusual symphony in the set is the last, #6,
running about 40 minutes, for two large chamber orchestras (one of which has
the preponderance of percussion), in three continuous “sections” which in turn
break into 21 separate little “songs”.
The work comes across as a sequence or narrative of experiences, morphing from one into the
next, rather than the usual “symphonic” argument (something I have experimented
with as a kind of “development” in my own writing).

The work is politically significant because Henze composed
it while living in Cuba it was first performed before members of the
Revolutionary Army. Henze was also gay, and his actions perhaps demonstrated a naïve
faith in connecting leftist politics with gay rights which we know the history
of Communism did not support. Henze dedicated some works to Ho Chi Minh and Che
Guevara.

Henze actually finished ten symphonies, the last in 2000, before his passing in 2012.

I have, packed up somewhere, an LP set of the controversial
1968 oratorio “The Raft of the Medusa” (“Das Floss der Medusa”), as a requiem for
Che. The story concerns a shipwreck of
a French frigate on the West Coast of Africa in 1816 (was it in the slave
trade?) Some characters wind up on a
raft, and lives have to be sacrificed.
When the work is performed on stage, the “living” gradually move across
the stage to join “the dead”. There is also a rock musical based on this opera (see YouTube) that was recently performed in Quebec City.

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